But, as I said, that was then.
And this was now.
And now, Patricia returned my kiss gently, afraid I would break, and then put her head on my shoulder and said, “This is nice, Matthew, sitting here.”
“Yes,” I said.
In a little while, she told me she had a busy day ahead tomorrow...
“Yes, me too,” I said.
...and really ought to be running on home.
Before I got shot, mi casa was su casa and vice versa.
But that was then.
And this was now.
8
He was trying to explain my condition to Patricia and me. What had been my condition. What my condition would be in the weeks ahead. What my condition could possibly become in the months ahead. The word “possibly” frightened me. I had just taken a mighty leap out of a very dark pit, what the hell did he mean by possibly? Patricia sat by the bed, gripping my hand.
Spinaldo explained that I had flat-lined briefly while they were attempting to remove the bullets from my chest...
“That’s not what you told us,” Patricia said.
Not for nothing was she the best prosecuting attorney in the entire state of Florida.
“When we were here at the hospital,” she explained, turning to me. “Frank and I.” She turned back to Spinaldo. “You told us there’d been a loss of blood to the brain for five minutes and forty seconds. That isn’t briefly.”
“No, it isn’t,” Spinaldo agreed. “But Mr. Hope has since reported that he recalls comments made during surgery...”
I did indeed.
Oh shit, he’s flat-lined... he’s in cardiac arrest... let’s pace him... Epinephrine... keep an eye on that clock... one cc, one to a thousand... still unobtainable...
“...and this would seem to indicate that he’d remained aware at some time during the arrest. I can only believe that the open cardiac massage we performed...”
Hands inside my chest. Massaging my naked heart.
“...did much to prevent total nonperfusion.”
“What’s nonperfusion?” Patricia asked.
I was letting her do all the talking.
I could think good, but it wasn’t coming out good.
“Total ischemia,” Spinaldo said.
Doctor talk. Worse than lawyer talk.
“And what’s that?”
Good old English. Good old Patricia. I squeezed her hand. Hard.
“Total loss of blood to the brain.”
“But you’re saying that didn’t happen.”
“It would appear so. I have to assume the brain was still getting something. You have to understand that the brain is the ultimate organ. It gets what it wants, and it gets it first, above all the other organs. It’s selfish. It has strategies for self-preservation in any crisis. The lidocaine helped, I’m sure. Turned what was most likely a ventricular tachycardia into a sinus tachycardia. But the brain was in there grabbing whatever oxygen it needed, struggling to autoregulate its blood supply. I’m guessing, of course. The point is... you were aware.”
There’d been darkness, there’d been intense light. There’d been unfathomable blackness, there’d been searing glare. There’d been no present, all was then. There’d been no past, all was now. Voices gone, concerned voices gone, lingering voices in the dark, voices swallowed in the then and the light. Whispering voices, pattering footfalls, flurries of movement, a circling of moths. Cold everywhere, hurting in the dark, shaking in the dark, sweating and hot...
Yes.
I’d been aware.
“Moreover,” Spinaldo said, “you began talking seven days after the cardiac arrest.”
“One word,” Patricia said.
She was thinking Seven days is a full week.
“Nonetheless. Any speech at all would indicate to me that his brainstem reflexes were intact, and that he was emerging out of a semicomatose state several days before he recovered full alertness.”
“Master of suspense,” Patricia said, and squeezed my hand again.
I did not feel like the master of anything at the moment.
I could not remember what had happened to me.
Everyone kept telling me I’d been shot.
Spinaldo said I would probably never remember all the details of the actual event. Spinaldo said this had to do with the way memory is moved from so-called short-term areas to long-term areas, where hardwired recollection is summoned up either consciously or unconsciously.
Here’s a loss-of-memory joke from the good doctor:
“The nice thing about recovering from a coma is that you get to meet new people every day.”
Some joke.
This was a week after I blinked up into his face.
I was already beginning to lose hope.
Guthrie Lamb could have chosen to become a cop instead of a private investigator, but the money wasn’t as good. Also, he hated all the paramilitary bullshit that was part and parcel of being a police officer. Guthrie hated any organization that evaluated a person by the uniform he was wearing. This was why he much preferred the company of naked broads.
Even so, he was forced to work with cops because there was no way he could otherwise get access to police and FBI files. This was a serious failing of the private-eye business. You had to depend on the people who were really empowered to investigate murders and such.
In fact, the last time Guthrie had ever heard of a private eye solving a murder case was never. It was one thing to gather information for an attorney who was defending a poor soul charged with murder, but it was quite another thing to be hired by some old tycoon who wanted you to find out who had murdered his beautiful blond daughter. Guthrie had never been hired by an old tycoon. Tell the truth, he had rarely come across too many beautiful blond daughters, either, dead or alive. What Guthrie did mostly was skip-tracing, or tailing wayward husbands for some woman wanted a divorce, or looking for some guy went out for a cup of coffee, didn’t come back in five years, his wife was beginning to get a little worried. Never once in his lifetime as a Famous Detective had he ever been hired to find out who’d killed somebody.
Even working for Matthew Hope this way — who seemed like a nice guy, by the way, except he’d got chintzy about Guthrie’s hourly rate, which, okay, it wasn’t the fifty an hour Guthrie had mentioned, but Hope could at least have gone to forty-seven fifty, couldn’t he? No, he’d stuck to what he was paying Warren Chambers, whoever the hell he was, and if he was so good why wasn’t Hope using him this time? Guthrie hated hassling over money. It made a person seem mercenary.
But even on a case like this one, which was in fact a murder case, Guthrie wasn’t actually looking for a murderer, he was simply looking for an automobile that may or may not have been parked outside the yacht club while a murder was being committed. Unless, of course, the person who’d left the car there was also the person who’d done the murder, in which case it could be said that Guthrie was, after all, looking for a murderer, though to tell the truth that would be stretching it.
A private eye was a private eye, period.
In the old days, when Guthrie was first starting in this business, the police were definite enemies. There wasn’t a time back then that the police wouldn’t at one point or another accuse the private eye himself of being the murderer, can you imagine? Big bulls from Homicide would drop in on him, maybe rough him up a little, haul him downtown to the cop shop, throw a scare into him, warn him to stay out of their way and keep his nose clean. If it wasn’t for the cops back then, any self-respecting private eye could have solved the most complicated murder case in ten seconds flat. But no, the cops were always interfering, making it difficult for a hard-working, hard-drinking shamus to get his job done.